Fixing Mail Threads in iOS 10

[bdahm]

Here is an outline from the podcast I recently heard. You may have noticed that mail threads are sorted in ascending order from the oldest to the newest. This is fine for following the thread from start to finish, but it often entails a lot of scrolling just to get to the last item in the thread. If you would prefer to have the thread displayed from newest to oldest, there is a way to do that as described in this outline.

Fixing Mail Threads in iOS 10

I actually use the amazing [Spark]( https://sparkmailapp.com) email app from Readdle so I hadn't really noticed the changes to Mail in iOS 10

Since the upgrade has come out though I've had a conversation with more than on frustrated user who is baffled by the new way Apple has decided to organize threaded email conversation

The two big changes that are befuddling users are organizing threads in chronological order from top to bottom and including your "sent" messages in the thread

By sent I mean not just quoting your message in the reply, but actually showing the sent item as a separate item in the thread

Some might like these changes, but others don't. I especially have heard complaints from people who get involved in long on-going back and forth email conversations because they have to do a lot of down scrolling to get the the most recent email.

Luckily it is fairly easy to undo the changes Apple has made.

To get the most recent emails in the thread back on top

Go to Settings > Mail and scroll to the "Threading" section

Then simply toggle the "Most Recent Message on Top" option to "On".

If you'd prefer to keep your sent messages out of the thread it's also easy to do

Go to Settings > Mail and scroll to the "Threading" section

Toggle the 'Complete Threads' option to "Off".

Still you might not want to turn off the "Complete Threads" option because it does do something cool

It will also pull in and emails in the thread regardless of which mailbox those are in.

So if you happen to send out messages from more than one account this feature may be useful.

You'll notice in the thread that Mail will even tell you where the message was "found" in a grey bar at the top. For example, "Found in Maccast Sent Mailbox".

The only issue is I have had some people tell me that occasionally the feature will pull together emails that are not really part of the same thread. Most often when two separate email threads happen to have the same subject line. Mail gets a little confused.